‘But I had my own suggestion. I had already arranged a couple of lower-profile weddings, and suggested that if she went through me, I would at least get the opportunity to travel with Harry for a few months.’

‘And the chance to sabotage the arrangement?’ Claire asked.

‘Well yes, but Harry warned me off, because if the wedding fell through his mother was determined to promote Deepak.’

‘This is very important,’ Gillard said, leaning across the table. ‘Did you ever hint, intimate, or suggest to Harry Roy that you could get rid of his mother?’

Zayan Lal’s eyes blazed. ‘Of course not. It would have been crazy! I pretended that I adored her just as much as he did.’

‘How did you get the opportunity to tamper with her deodorant?’

‘I saw one in her en suite bathroom in Richmond. So I bought an identical one, injected thallium solution through the seam of the plastic casing, then substituted it. Of course what I hadn’t realised was that she was paranoid about body odour, and had identical roll-ons in her other flat, in her desk drawer and in her car. I’m not even sure where mine ended up.’

‘In the desk at work, and barely used,’ Claire said.

‘So at what point did you decide that strategy had failed?’ Gillard asked.

‘I think it was on the flight out to Mumbai with Harry. I had already realised the poisoning didn’t work, and when I went to her en suite, the roll-on had been replaced by a new one. I was in a panic. It became clear to me that Harry was actually going to go ahead with the marriage. He knew Sonali had suffered from polio, and that several attempts by her family to marry her off had failed. We both knew the family was getting desperate now that Sonali had reached thirty, so the dowry was going to be enormous.’

‘Did you know how big?’

‘No, that was a closely-guarded secret. The negotiations were done by Vikram Vaj and L. P. Gosht.’

‘So you ran out of options to sabotage it?’

‘Well, yes. I assumed once Harry met her, and found out how pushy she was, he would no longer be bewitched by that face. I mean she’s got such a chip on her shoulder, and a voice like a spin dryer. Her mother is a nightmare. Anyway, after they met, Harry described her as rather lovely and vulnerable underneath. He tried to persuade me that he could keep me on in some personal staff capacity so that we could meet, but I knew it could never work. That’s when I decided. So I told Harry I was going off to meet some of my own family in Orissa, and would meet him in Dubai.’

‘So you changed your flight details to allow you to get back to Britain via Dubai and Gatwick, commit the crime, fly back to Dubai the next day, and use the last part of your previous ticket,’ Gillard said.